Drew Hopkins, president of Viridis Aquaponics, in the tomato production greenhouse in Watsonville. They grow 20,000 tomato plants in this greenhouse.

Drew Hopkins, president of Viridis Aquaponics, in the tomato production greenhouse in Watsonville. They grow 20,000 tomato plants in this greenhouse.

Photo: Sarah Rice / Special To The Chronicle

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Drew Hopkins, president and co-founder of Viridis Aquaponics, in the aquaponic tomato greenhouse in Watsonville. The company grows 20,000 tomato plants in this greenhouse.

Drew Hopkins, president and co-founder of Viridis Aquaponics, in the aquaponic tomato greenhouse in Watsonville. The company grows 20,000 tomato plants in this greenhouse.

Photo: Sarah Rice / Special To The Chronicle

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Specialty cherry tomatoes grown at Viridis Aquaponics in Watsonville.

Specialty cherry tomatoes grown at Viridis Aquaponics in Watsonville.

Photo: Sarah Rice / Special To The Chronicle

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The nursery where they produce transplants. Viridis Aquaponics supplies organic produce to restaurants, private companies, Cal State Chico and UC Santa Cruz, and has a proposal to expand to other UC campuses.

The nursery where they produce transplants. Viridis Aquaponics supplies organic produce to restaurants, private companies, Cal State Chico and UC Santa Cruz, and has a proposal to expand to other UC campuses.

Photo: Sarah Rice / Special To The Chronicle

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Virdis Aquaponics sprouts and grows, supplying organic produce

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The coolest farm between San Francisco and Santa Barbara doesn’t use dirt.

Although surrounded by conventional farms, Viridis Aquaponic Growers sets up in a massive Watsonville greenhouse just over the border from Monterey County. Catfish, yellow sunfish, sturgeon and koi swirl in different 600-gallon plastic barrels. A modest sump pump, drawing the only power a basic system needs, swirls their waste to the top of the tank, where it’s fed to another barrel with snails, beetles, water bugs and zooplankton.

Gravity pushes the nitrate-rich water into a floating charcoal bed growing vegetables — beets, green onions, carrots and radishes — then flows beneath rafts of spicy watercress and veiny Thai basil. Then the water, its nutrients exhausted, runs back into the big fish tank.

In simple terms, the fish feed the plants, which clean the water, which irrigates lush produce. The lettuce and bok choy are so robust that one restaurant buyer says its diners “don’t need to (otherwise) hydrate.”

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Ultimately the fish will go to market, too, and sturgeon caviar could offer another revenue stream. The outputs are all certified organic by California Certified Organic Farmers — even cleaner, farm staff says, because anything impure would harm the fish.

The systems are productive — earlier this summer Viridis was harvesting 5,000 heads of lettuce a day while using as little as 2 percent of the area’s water and no pesticides or fertilizers.

It can seem futuristic, but more than anything it’s simple. Self-made scientist Jon Parr of Monterey designed the original system.

“The deeper you go,” he says, “the more connected it becomes.”

Viridis began when Parr met Drew Hopkins at a barbecue in Santa Cruz. Hopkins was looking to change his life after the death of his teenage son, Hadyn K. “Huk” Hopkins, a daredevil Olympian-to-be who hit a bump snowmobiling at 100 mph and smashed into a tree. Hopkins went looking for how he would go on.

“I had a consciousness only people who have had a loss like that understand,” he says. “New things became very important.”

He had been running resorts, but became more interested in feeding people and started studying high-performance agriculture.

Parr didn’t necessarily want a partner — he just wanted to grow food at home. “The whole reason you have a garden is so you don’t have to go to the store,” he says. “You grab a tomato while you’re walking into your home. You’re self-sufficient.”

A self-described “sponge for information,” Parr began Internet research binges that taught him so much that he’s now the teacher, speaking regularly with groups like the Aquaponics Association Conference and the San Francisco Home and Garden Show.

“I encourage natural components, diversity,” he says. “If you have a hiccup or flaw or toxicity, you find out what in nature handles that and encourage it.”

By the time he met Hopkins, he had a slick system. Hopkins offered financial and connection-making capital. A business plan sprouted in May 2013, aiming to harvest 800,000 heads of lettuce a month. Additional investors came a month later (and are still coming). Viridis acquired Obertello Nursery for about $2.4 million last summer.

A dozen destinations like Tarpy’s Roadhouse Grill, Portola Hotel, Rio Grill, Rocky Point Restaurant and Alvarado Street Brewing Co. use Viridis red-vein sorrel, curly watercress and red-oak lettuce, often delivered live-root so they can be harvested to order.

The cumulative effect feels like a fundamental part of farming’s future. As of late, co-founders Parr and Hopkins are approaching that from different directions.

Parr has left Viridis to go fully nonprofit and in the direction of schools with his educational creation, SchoolGrown, partnering with several area high schools to install 1,800-square-foot greenhouse systems to supply 50 weekly community-supported agriculture subscriptions. Science classes, the Future Farmers of America and business classes will all participate.

His ultimate goal is to reach 100,000 schools. He has completed a basic computer-assisted-design drawing that requires little more than clear plastic paneling, local lumber, a community weekend build-out and the help of a handyman.

“When I play this thing out,” Parr says, “we involve local high schools — a dozen, then 100 to 1,000. Every local community that throws up a dozen or three dozen has the city’s food supply. I was amazed how much our farm produces. When it catches on, I think it will spread like wildfire.”

Hopkins might be even more ambitious, and steering toward other educational places.

Viridis already furnishes produce for Cal State Chico and UC Santa Cruz — which serves as many as 25,000 meals a day at 14 service points by itself — and so impressed the university that campus officials have integrated Viridis into a proposal for the UC systemwide Global Food Initiative.